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You are correct, and I apologize for my mistake. Ross wrote a book, The Myth of Persecution, in 2013. I got them mixed up.

Thank you for retracting that, I was given an infraction because of it.

Originally Posted by Faber

Your basic argument is that Christians hijacked their own history. Your support is articles claiming that the persecution under Nero was not due to the fire, and not as severe as Christians claimed. Granted, Tacitus hesitates to blame Nero for the fire.

Haraldsson cites three people agreeing with this notion that you wish to ignore.

Who? I clicked onto the link to get part one of his essay, but all that did was take me to more leftist nonsense from PolicicusUSA. In part two, however, he mentions Michael Grant,

In the end we will never know, and as Michael Grant points out in reference to Tacitus, “But systematic, careful references are a modern invention. Ancient historians only specified their sources in a fragmentary and unsystematic fashion.” (citing Grant's The Annals of Imperial Rome".)

Actually, if you read the paragraphs before that, you will see that Grant is criticising Tacitus's negative handling of Tiberius Caesar. Grant adds,

"After Tiberius, his accounts of Claudius and Nero, viewed as character studies, can afford to be more straightforward."

In The Jews in the Roman World (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons; 1973. P. 179), Grant writes about the community of Christians:

Now, in 64, this community incurred savage treatment from Nero. For Rome was partially wrecked by a terrible fire; and when the homeless refugees began to believe rumours (no doubt untruthful) that the emperor himself had deliberately started the conflagration owing to his passion to reconstruct the city, the government chose to blame the Christians as the incendiarists. Our account comes from the historian Tacitus, writing half a century later and relying on sources whose authenticity we cannot assess...."

He then quotes the passage from Tacitus, then adds:

Grant, like Tacitus, hesitates to accept that Nero was responsible for the fire. But he certainly agrees with Tacitus and Suetonius about the harsh treatment of the Roman Christians under Nero.

"Look at what happened after the European peoples succeeded in removing the clergy from public life and restricting them to their churches. They built up human being promoted enlightenment, creativity and rebellion. States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear."-Raif Badawi

Yes. While some Christian apologists should be discounted based on their faulty logic. Liberalism such as appears on that website is totally illogical.

The political opinions of the website are meaningless with the amount of research done.

Originally Posted by Faber

Who are the other two?

The other two you tried to use against me. You only used one source.

"Look at what happened after the European peoples succeeded in removing the clergy from public life and restricting them to their churches. They built up human being promoted enlightenment, creativity and rebellion. States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear."-Raif Badawi

The amount of research done is meaningless if they have a biased agenda they're trying to support.

Then we should dismiss all the apologists on this whole website because they have a serious conservative political agenda that's behind the times.

"Look at what happened after the European peoples succeeded in removing the clergy from public life and restricting them to their churches. They built up human being promoted enlightenment, creativity and rebellion. States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear."-Raif Badawi